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Diarrhoeal dilemma in Nepal

Bhuwan Thapaliya - 8/31/2009

It sounded like an innocuous question from a foreign TV reporter – “What is the worth of a rural Nepalese life?” Except it came at a time when diarrhoeal epidemic in Jajorkot, Rukum, Bajhang, Baitadi, Rukum, Dailekh, Doti and various other Mid- Western region of the country have been wrecking havoc.

Except it came at a time when I was reading Mules, a poem, which portrays the socio- economic picture of Nepal as it is by eminent poet and my mentor, Yuyutsu RD Sharma from his new poetry collection Annapurna Poems( Poems New and Collected. ISBN – 81 -8250 -040-0, Nirala Series , India ).


On the great Tibetan
salt route they meet me again
old forsaken friends…
on their faces
fatigue of a drunken sleep
their lives worn out,
their legs twisted, shaking
from carrying
illustrious flags of bleeding ascents.
- Mules ( Yuyutsu RD Sharma)


The diarrhea epidemic has been raging in various districts of Nepal despite government claims that it has been nullified but the death tolls report from the field suggests otherwise. People are still dying and they are still suffering from states negligence. The recurring diarrhea epidemic is making the very mockery of the ‘New Nepal’ we all claim to be building.

Our languid government did nothing concrete to decipher the health catastrophe and save precious lives apart from expensive high level visits to the infected regions with minimal relief packages and medicines amid maximum words of fabricated sympathy.

Losses could have been minimized if experience were used to avoid repetition of the past mistakes. Had the government acted instantly then those deaths could have been avoided – those precious lives could have been saved.

Unfortunately, after more than three months of the outbreak majority of the patients are not getting timely treatment and medicines, and they blame it on the remoteness and the unhygienic lifestyle of the victims. The truth however is this - the state’s laxity broke the victim’s immunity.

Furthermore, Department of Food Technology and Quality Control has confirmed that food supplied by UN World Food Programme (WFP) to western hilly district Jajarkot was not edible. What an irony?

Whatever the diarrhea causes, to stop it from recurring again, the government should implement a community – based health information system at the earliest so that in crisis times, community health workers can take the incentives immediately.

Imagine the spread of diarrhoeal epidemic in Kathmandu . Would the state have neglected the Kathmanduites as it has been neglecting the Jajorkotis or Bajhangis? Of course not. What are we to make of this?

The answer is simple: the worth of rural Nepalese life is nil. No where is the inequality between rural and urban inhabitants is as pervasive as in Nepal – much of the inequality has its origin in decades of policies that favored cities over countryside.

In the ongoing political rat race, our leaders have forgotten the plight of the rural Nepalese on whose empowerment the fate of this nation depends. People in Jajorkot, Bajhang, Rukum and Baitadi are not asking for money, nor are they asking for a color TV, they are asking for some basic medicines and treatment but they are not getting them in time.

Why such discrimination within the same nation? Why aren’t they getting the basis amenities necessary for their survival? Why they are aggravated by biases in favor of cities in the allocation of physical and social infrastructure?

It’s high time that our politicians comprehend and respect the common consensus of the people as 41 out of 75 districts in Nepal , it is said, are being torn apart by a food crisis and 41 percent of the populations are believed to be undernourished.

Realigning key health care from recurring diseases such as diarrhea may require a sound policy base and coverage of packaged interventions but at the same time it is increasingly recognized that actions to scale up packages of interventions may need to be segmented according to the cry of the hour in a country as Nepal.